Just got a flatscreen monitor for 5 bucks at a garage sale. It even works! Local shop had a used dual port card for $30.

Why have a dual screen? Awesome! You'll never go back. For research, spreadsheets, games, convenience, artwork, CAD, efficiency, etc. Cutting /pasting much easier.
Rant: Q. Why are so many newer web pages unable to size down onto a smaller window?
A. Follow the money - their ads don't show properly. It's all about them, not about you. End Rant.

Searching on this topic, it seems most entries are old, or for laptops. There was some mention of incorporating dual monitor into Puppy but so far, I haven't found anything in the menu.

First I identified the video card. Slickpet easily probed my system and reported the following:
ATI RV280 (Radeon 9200 SE Rev1). It has two output jacks - a vga and a dvi - for which i got an adapter. This means that one output is dvi.

Until Puppy upgrades xorgwizard, one must edit /etc/x11/xorg.conf. There are several threads, some very long/ too complex for a noob to figure out and was nervous about just copy/pasting the whole thing which may be for a different puppy, etc.

Caution: messing with xorg can cause puppy to crash and be unable to start up again as I found out the hard way. Fortunately John Doe was able to point out that if your modified xorg stops in startup leaving you at a prompt, you just type 'xorgwizard' and then after it has finished, 'xwin', to continue the startup. You should still backup your pup_save file since if the screen goes wonky, you may not be able to recover - as i learned the hard way - again!
edit - well, there is a way - during bootup, hit F2 key when instructed, enter
puppy pfix=nox
this will eventually get to a prompt where you can enter 'xorgwizard' as above
edit2 - umm, seems i lost my printer setup so better save the _save file after all.

There are 4 things to change in xorg - server layout, screen, monitor and device, and you must tell Puppy that screen1 is left or right of screen0 (the default is all screens showing same image). Order seems not to be important. But for some reason, leftof never worked so just use rightof.

Also note that while the solution arrived at seems general in nature, it may be only applicable to my particular video card. Well, I mean the format is what hopefully works for you, specific details must naturally change to suit your machine.

Thanks to Monsie and Karl Godt for their invaluable help - and patience with this noob.

Mazes - what follows is the bowels of my researches and howls of my discontent and the helpful comments that ultimately led to success. Proceed at your own risk!

Here's the links found so far with a brief notation.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=74601
for laptop based on the Navidia card not the ATI Radeon that I have. Also the instructions there were meant for experts - I'll need something more detailed. It mentioned twinview, openbox, Compiz/Beryl, xfce but I don't know what to do with this info.

http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=01213
Barry's Blog. He gives a link to Pizzagood's code but link is broken. I've asked Barry for a repost and will post here when available. Apparently it was put in Woof but not Slacko??

Well, that's as far as I've got so maybe I'll stop and post, especially as the larger monitor just blinked out (no signal). Seems not to be liking whatever I've done so hopefully some kind soul will come along!! Hoping also I didn't bust anything.

*
So i got me a xorg.conf named /etc/X11/xorg.conf.NVIDIA without monitor appending . I am not happy about the chip/card detection because i have three different Nvidia Cards and Hardware Changes are not recognized because "NVIDIA" is everywhere the same but the Chip not .

I have one recent Nvidia card with DVI-I, HDMI and VGA port and ddcprobe only tests for the first one, the DVI one . If i attach the VGA cable to the VGA port directly, ddcprobe fails completely with no output at all . The kernel console is OK .

*

Next problem is a DELL Mini-Tower with onboard Intel Graphics chip and PCIe slot containig the recent Nvidia Card . If the board VGA port is connected to one monitor and the Nvidia Card to a second monitor, the DELL Bios shows a message on the screen it would accept only one graphic chip and i would need to fix that .

Thanks for joining in. I fixed link as nooby suggested! I tried the ddcprobe command in rxvt as Karl suggested but how does one copy the result to paste it here? ^C doesn't seem to work

It only sees one monitor (Acer). But is says monitorrange: 30-82, 56-76 so is the second range for the second monitor? What is all that other info for?

I also notice that there are many xorg.conf files in the /etc/x11 directory, one called xorg.conf.ATIRADEON_9200AcerAL1916W which corresponds to my video card/ primary monitor.

There's also an xorg.conf.NVIDIASUSVH242H. I'm wondering if Nvidia was the old videocard (gone at 'puter store!). Maybe I should restart after unplugging the small monitor. Hmm. - edit - tried. Had to restart X to get right keyboard. Command ddcprobe stopped halfway - said 'edidfail' - end edit.

So which of these many xorg files is supposed to be modified? Maybe I try the main xorg.conf......

Why is the second (larger) monitor shutting down? edit - I found by looking at the generated xorg file that the monitor settings were somewhat different so I'll try setting monitor1 accordingly. - end edit

Thanks in advance. edit - I see we're both posting at same time! I'll try editing xorg to add the other monitor info - but I'm confused how to arrange - put monitor sections together or keep separate? eg:

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
details
endsection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
details
endsection

or to put together with only one endsection after both monitors are described? Or maybe it doesn't matter?Last edited by canbyte on Wed 25 Jul 2012, 18:00; edited 1 time in total

Hi Karl, I answered some questions by editing previous post but here is ddcprobe printout (presently with both monitors plugged in (edid didn't fail this time). As you can see the ASUS monitor is not mentioned,

The monitor has been failing at unexpected moments, usually during editing this thread. I think after I can tell it the new settings it should hopefully stop doing this. I realized the second number question I asked before - the second #s refer to the vertical, first is horizontal range. I'll edit above later.

That's an interesting link you posted, especially the last part - have you figured out how it applies in Puppy?

Here is what I'm trying to get xorg to run (just showing the last half of the file - after the line that says

Some progress: The following code now works to restart x so evidently, the separate monitor/ screen descriptions are the proper format. What is not happening is the combining of both screens into one. Seems something is missing besides just the layout section.

Fed up i am beginning to get. Just found a sort of official looking post that suggests that the only way to resolve the issue is for each user to determine exactly the version of xorg used and perhaps RandR also. per the following

Quote:

Hi, I understand that since randr 1.3 you don't need xinerama anymore. Is that right?
[edit] randr 1.3 fullscreen

That's true there doesn't need to be a device section, screen section, server flag section or server layout section. In fact you only need two monitor sections with two lines in it:

I would have to conclude that the xorg/ RandR thing is being constantly upgraded and my guess is that Puppy developers can't/ wont keep up with such details for only a very small segment of users. Thus, how can a noob hope to ever sort out all the permutation of versions and which applies when Puppy might have adopted them (or part thereof)??? Hopeless - unless one has nothing else to do! Seems like I bit off more than I could chew. Besides it's summertime and it seems not many folks are around. Sorry folks. Abandoning ship, hoping for rescue. SOS._________________1. Dell Dimension E521, AMD Athln 64, 2 GHz 1.93GB ram,
Puppy 533 on CD, accesses flash drive only,
FFox Nightly12.0
2. Compaq P3 733Hz 375RAM
Printer: Oki C3400 > LAN

I am interested in your situation, would like to see a successful outcome here, so I did some research...

If you haven't done so already, try enabling Xinerama in xorg.conf This seems worth a try given your ATI graphics card, otherwise... if you had an nVidia card, you would use the TwinView configuration.

One important note is that both of your monitors must be set to the same color depth eg. 16 bpp or 24 bpp for Xinerama to work properly. Another note worth mentioning is to make sure that you have two listings for each section concerning: Monitor Device & Screen.

Monsie_________________My username is pronounced: "mun-see". Derived from my surname, it was my nickname throughout high school.

It looks like his change had to do with fixing a problem for someone who had only one monitor but had a video card that supported two monitors. So it may not be helpful in your case.

And, yes, it does look like Pizzasgood's code was added to the xorgwizard that is currently in Woof2.

Do note this line in Pizzasgood's message:

Pizzasgood wrote:

. . . additional Screen sections. It doesn't hurt to fix it so that it does create them, and that way somebody like me who actually wants to use them just has to uncomment the appropriate line in the Server section, and not have to also create the Screen section.

So, although xorgwizard does much of the work, if one runs multiple monitors a user still has to make that manual change to one line in xorg.conf. But I see that this is not your problem, since your Screen1 line in your ServerLayout section is not commented-out.

Probably the lack of support for automatically handling multiple monitors is related to this comment in xorgwizard:

This seems to be limited by ddcprobe, which doesn't seem to have good support for multiple monitors.

Anyway, you seem to have already progressed well beyond this in your manual changes to xorg.conf. So if you were still curious about Pizzasgood's change, this should shed some light on that, but I fear that it won't bring you any closer to your goal than you already are. I hope that Monsie's post above will be more helpful to you.

I tried Monsie's mod, unfortunately no luck which maybe corroberates the note from yesterday that xinerama is now obsolete. After yesterday's readings, I'm convinced that the screw up is the lingo confusion and that the wording should reflect this reality :

screen0 is comprised of monitor0 and monitor1. Screen0 width should be 2048 not 1024. There is no screen1 desired. The gentoo fix was to add a line about 'virtual' in the monitor section but I've had no luck trying this.

So I should be saying monitor1 is rightof monitor0 - somewhere, no?

The colour depth is 16 for both.

To clarify/confirm, there is only one device, not two but yes, there are two monitor sections and for now, despite the above, two screen sections. But should we really ignore the statement "there doesn't need to be a device section, screen section, server flag section or server layout section. " (even if it's on a gentoo forum)??

Re npierce/ pizza's mods for xorgwizard - does make sense to mod the parent rather than the child, however, it appears that the mods are already present in my xorgwizard. Starts on line 1320.

One exception. Pizza's code in xorgwizard.diff is shown below. The code in red is not included in my xorgwizard (or in Pizza's on screen version). I doubt it matters but please comment if it is needed.

PREFERREDMODE=$FINALXY #v3.98 rerwin - set monitor preferred mode same as

Bottom line is that as npierce suggested, this tack looks to be at a dead end, or at least not the place my meager noobish talents will do any good! The wizard is complex, as I guess all wizards are. Back to xorg.conf.

Yes, try changing "LeftOf" in the ServerLayout section to "rightof" because I have seen this used in example configurations of Xorg. I kept your terminology in the sample configuration I gave you because I didn't think it mattered, but maybe, in fact, it does.

Quote:

To clarify/confirm, there is only one device, not two but yes, there are two screen and monitor sections.

I am of the understanding that this does matter when using Xinerama, so I would give it a try:

Given your posting of xorg.conf and ddcprobe I believe this is what your "Device" sections should look like. Note that I didn't include the rest of the Device Options in my example for the sake of brevity... you can include that information if you want... as it is optional.

Hope this helps,
Monsie_________________My username is pronounced: "mun-see". Derived from my surname, it was my nickname throughout high school.

Re: Dual Screen with ATI Radeon 9200 on Ubuntu 8.10
Looks like the radeon driver is loading, so all should be good for you now. To be sure run Code: glxgears

Thanks

Edit - turns out i don't know how to add attachment so for other noobs like me..... A link shows allowed extensions but shows max upload size as 0 bytes!! Trying it anyway then it says "The Extension log is not allowed". Hmm, i see a zip thing on desktop so let's try that. Worked. Attachment added. Hooray! I'll pray you find something.

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